Many companies only monitor sales activities of their sales representatives in an ad hoc manner, if at all. In companies having a large volume of sales or large numbers of independent sales representatives, it may be difficult to track irregular and fraudulent sales activity. A company may become aware of irregular or suspicious sales activity by word of mouth, such as a customer complaint or reports by employees who become aware of a problem. In other instances, the company may not know of irregular sales activity until an official complaint has been filed with, or an investigation is commenced by, a government regulatory entity. For example, an insurance company may not be aware of a problem with a sales agent until the state insurance department reports a complaint to the insurance company.
Another way companies may learn of sales irregularities is through customer surveys. However, customer surveys may not be completed or returned by all customers. Also, the problems may not become evident from the customer surveys quickly enough. The customer surveys may also be costly due to distribution costs, while not providing enough feedback to allow effective tracking of irregular sales activity.
Thus, a company may not learn of many cases of irregular sales activity. If the company does learn of the irregular sales activity, the company may nevertheless not be alerted to the problem soon enough to effectively deal with the problem.
There is a need for a systematic means for a company to monitor irregular sales activities and to alert the company at an early time if problems exist.
The invention includes a system and a method for identifying irregular sales activity. In one embodiment, the method includes the steps of extracting data related to a first predetermined criteria from at least one of a predetermined set of files based on a first guideline; generating a first criteria specific report based on the first predetermined criteria; extracting data related to a second predetermined criteria from at least one of the predetermined set of files based on a second guideline; generating a second criteria specific report based on the second predetermined criteria; generating an intermediate report including information from the criteria specific reports; and generating an irregular sales activity report.
The first criteria specific report includes data related to the first predetermined criteria associated with one or more entities of at least one predetermined entity type. The second criteria specific report includes data related to the second predetermined criteria associated with the one or more entities.
The intermediate report organizes and combines the data of the criteria by entity.
The irregular sales activity report may compute the criteria scores and a total score based on the criteria scores using a predetermined totaling formula. The irregular sales activity report may list all of the entities having a total score greater than a selected irregular sales activity signaling score.